


Strange Pairs

by urcadelimabean



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Brief Mention of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 09:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17383871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urcadelimabean/pseuds/urcadelimabean
Summary: In Philadelphia, Anne thinks about a conversation she had with Flint in Nassau.





	Strange Pairs

Anne remembered being on deck that night, with the moon hung above the sea behind a cloud like a hidden jewel. Captain Flint had startled her–he had been so still she had thought he was just a shadow, and then he moved into the half-moonlight, and suddenly he was no longer an apparition but a man. Anne had slowly taken her hand off her sword hilt and approached him.

He had wordlessly offered her the bottle he was holding. She’d taken a swig and passed it back, not knowing what to make of this encounter. They could just stand there in silence and drink as the ship drew closer to the Maroon camp–that’d be fine with her.

“The cache of gems,” Flint had begun, voice level as he could make it, but Anne thought she heard it tremble, the sound of the greatest effort to maintain control beginning to fail. “That contains more than just those physical objects locked inside, as Rackham described it…”

If she was expected to reply, Anne didn’t know what the fuck she’d say. The anger and hurt when she thought of Max was mixed with a bitter longing unlike anything she’d ever known. Everything they’d sacrificed was in that stupid chest, and right now Anne would rather see it rotting at the bottom of the sea.

"Your lost love,” Flint continued, voice quieter now, “and mine, as well.”

Anne could hear her own heart beat. That secret should be safe in the cache. She tried to pierce the darkness with her gaze but Flint’s face was disguised in shadow…just the shuddering of his shoulder betrayed a heaved breath, as if he was the one about to lay himself bare.

“Why you tellin’ me this,” Anne began, feeling suddenly like she should offer him an out, and it wasn’t often she felt the need for courtesy. She wondered how much he’d been drinking, leaned in and sniffed. 

Flint inhaled an unsteady breath. "He…” Something in him seemed to crumble and he brought a hand to his face with one stifled sob, then held onto the railing, barely making a sound between short anguished breaths. Anne stilled, changed by that single word, and the man before her was also changed, revealed in the darkness. 

“What happened to ‘im?” Anne asked, keeping her voice low, words almost lost in the waves. Whatever this was deserved to be treated gently, to be protected, like Max had protected her.

“He’s dead. Thomas is dead.” Flint’s voice was even again– the same voice she’d heard him use to order men to plot their course or fix something about the rigging. “Miranda is dead. Both of them were killed, literally or…driven to it.”

“Men who did it…got what was coming to them?”

Flint considered her words. “I made sure they did, yes.”

Anne let out a quiet breath, slowly, shifting slightly to look out over the sea, thinking about the men she’d killed for Max and the how many more she’d be willing to kill. The silence felt peaceful now, but heavy with the weight of what had been confided between them. “I’ll ask again. The fuck are you telling me this for.”

“Because,” Flint replied, “I know you won’t tell anyone. Eleanor’s love…she was your love, wasn’t she.”

Anne said nothing, just let Flint’s words be washed away in the wind, stood next to him and looked at the sea, thought of Nassau and how some part if her would always be there no matter how far she left it behind.

Flint passed her the bottle again. “Perhaps I’m telling you this because…because our most basic instinct is to tell a story about our lives that makes sense, and tell it to people it makes sense to. Or perhaps I’ve simply had too much to drink.”

Anne drank the last drops from the bottle. “I ain’t never needed a story to make sense of shit. World don’t make sense anyway. Don’t see how shit can change that.”

Flint shook his head. “Because it’s not inevitable for the world to be as it is, it only seems so. And it matters what stories we tell.”

“Problem with trying to change the world is the whole fucking world.”

Flint turned to her, silhouetted against the dimly lit sea, and gave a strange little laugh, then sighed. “Fair enough.”

Anne had never given much thought to what sort of man he was, where he came from. She watched him slowly transform from a lost, grieving man back into the Captain Flint she had known like he was donning a disguise, bandaging the wounded parts of himself until they were invisible once more. 

But she still remembered that man after, the one weeping for his dead lovers into the sea.

~

It was a long time later, when Jack returned to Philadelphia, and Anne sat with him and Max by the fire, that she heard how Captain Flint had been unmade and how Lord Thomas Hamilton had come back from the dead. 

Jack thought it was likely that McGraw would escape Savannah, but believed he would present no problems for Nassau.

"Fuck’s the point of that?” Anne had asked. “Why would Silver do it knowing he’ll escape?”

Jack had sighed, raising an eyebrow. “Perhaps Mr. Silver could not have done it if he had believed he was truly sentencing Flint to serve the rest of his life for crimes that surely we’ve all committed. It would not be the first time love and betrayal were tangled together in such a way.”

Anne thought about the feeling of Max’s hand in her own, only a few nights past–she couldn’t keep her thoughts from drifting back to Max, like a tide always returning to the land. She looked at Max’s hands folded in her lap where she sat beside her.

Anne fiddled with the bandage wrapped across her palm. “So Flint–McGraw–is with him, this Thomas Hamilton?”

“Yes,” Jack replied, glanced briefly between Max and Anne. “He was reunited with his love.”

“And the cache?” Anne asked.

“In the ground,” Max said, “never to bother us again, and Nassau is ours.”

Jack did look self-satisfied about that.

Slowly, Anne placed her palm on the back of Max’s hand, felt Max turn her palm up and close her fingers around the bandage. Anne looked up and saw Jack looking at her tenderly. He came to sit on her other side and placed a kiss on her brow. Max’s hand in hers felt like all the world’s gold.

There was an old piece of flint beside the fire. Anne thought about McGraw putting aside his disguise. She’d never needed one. Well…she glanced at her old battered hat beside the door. Maybe she’d put her disguise away more slowly.

Jack’s head nodded down onto her shoulder.

"This story about McGraw…it touched you.”

Anne looked up at Max’s words, and felt Max’s fingers stroke the back of her hand.

“Somethin’ Jack said once, it’s from some story–a play I think. ‘Journeys end in lovers meetings.’ Thought it was all some fucking nonsense at the time.”

A tear fell down Max’s cheek. She shook her head, and wiped her eye quickly. “It’s not nonsense.” She moved in close under Anne’s arm and pulled a blanket over them, then found Anne’s hand again.


End file.
